The Problem of Evil - Common Sense Atheism

156 Notes
to the metaphysical problem of good and evil.) However this may be, the
problem of evil is not a special case of the metaphysical problem of good
and evil: the problem of evil is not the ‘‘form’’ in which the metaphysical
problem of good and evil confronts the theist. It would, moreover, be
wrong to say that, because the atheist needs to find a solution to the
metaphysical problem of good and evil—suppose for the sake of argument
that that is so—the atheist, as much as the theist, needs to find a solution
to the problem of evil. It remains true, it remains a very simple and obvious
truth, that the existence of evil (the existence of bad things) poses at least a
prima facie threat to theism and does not pose even a prima facie threat to
atheism.
LECTURE2THEIDEAOFGOD
1. Why only the Middle Eastern or Abrahamic religions? Why not the Far
Eastern religions? The short answer is that because of the intimate historical
connections among the three Abrahamic religions, it is plausible to suppose
that the meaning their adherents give to the word ‘God’—when they are
speaking English—is the same. Now suppose an adherent of some Eastern
religion were to say, in English, ‘‘My co-religionists and I believe in God,
but we do not, like Jews, Christians, and Muslims, believe that God is a
person; we regard him rather as an impersonal first principle.’’ I think it
would be plausible to maintain that the person who said this was translating
some Hindi or Pali or Sanskrit word into English as ‘God’ when he ought
to be translating it in some other way. (And why not say this, if the history
of the word he is translating as ‘God’ has no connection with the history
of the English word or with the history of Deus or theos or elohim?)
2. Not so long ago, as time is measured in the history of thought, anyone
whosaidthatitwasamistaketoregardx as F would have meant, and
have been taken by everyone to mean, that x was not F. Not so long ago, if
you had used the phrase ‘object over against us’, people would have stared
blankly at you and have asked what you could possibly mean by it. Not
so long ago, anyone who said that the items in a certain list of properties
were not features of a particular being would have meant, and have been
taken by everyone to mean, that nothing had the properties specified in the
list. Not so long ago, everyone who said that nothing had the properties
in the list ‘aseity, holiness, omnipotence, omniscience, providence, love,
self-revelation’ would have proudly described himself as an atheist.
3. For my thoughts on the relation between the proposition ‘God is a person’
and the proposition ‘In God there are three persons’, see my essays ‘‘And
yet They Are Not Three Gods but One God’’, ‘‘Not by Confusion of
Substance but by Unity of Person’’, and ‘‘Three Persons in One Being: On
Attempts to Show that the Doctrine of the Trinity is Self-Contradictory’’.